Marriage, money, and sex: Dr. Hamilton finds a wife

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2003 by Elaine G. Breslaw

"Poor Hamilton," moaned the life-long bachelor Stephen Bordley to his friend, Witham Marshe, "is gone!--nor dead, but married." Bordley lamented that the thirty-five year old Sandy Hamilton, "was the day before yesterday obliged to Surrender discretion, to throw himself up to the Money of Peggy Dulany." He feared that no longer a bachelor, Sandy was destined to become "a very Grave sober fellow." (1) Bordley was guilty of hyperbole in assuming that marriage would dampen Hamilton's sociability. He correctly predicted that Peggy's dowry would free his friend from financial constraints. But Bordley seemingly ignored the other aspects of Hamilton's life that would be enriched by this marriage, particularly the emotional and sexual.

When choosing a wife, eighteenth-century suitors, not unusually, considered marriage as a source of wealth. But other concerns--sexual satisfaction, emotional bonding, personal inclination, and social prestige--also entered into the mix of motives. This essay evaluates the relative strength of sexual urges, the quest for wealth, and the importance of social prestige in the American side of the transatlantic marriage market through the adventures of Bordley's friend, a Scots emigre, Dr. Alexander Hamilton and the family he married into.

This Hamilton was the son of a Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. He had arrived in Maryland during the winter of 1738-39, an ambitious Scot of high rank, but little money. His brothers Gavin (a bookseller) and Robert (a Presbyterian minister) continued the family tradition in Edinburgh as enlightened cultural and religious leaders. They and their younger brother, our immigrant in Maryland, had adopted the British upper class values and manners so coveted by Americans who were even more conscious of their provincial status than these Scots improvers. (2) Alexander had followed an older brother to America in hopes of improving his own life style by finding a "moneyd wife. (3)

America as a source of wives for impecunious, but upwardly mobile Scotsmen was not a new phenomenon. When successful in finding a woman with money, however, the Scots, unlike the English, preferred to return home with what fortunes they had acquired through marriage. (4) Alexander and his brother John were among the few who chose to remain and adapt to a life that differed considerably from the one they knew at home. Alexander did not hesitate to write about the difficulties and as a result left a rich source of information on the process of adjustment particularly as it related to his sexuality and search for a wife.

At the time of his marriage in May of 1747 Hamilton had struggled for almost eight years to create a comfortable niche in a primitive New World environment. He maintained a thriving medical practice but chafed at the difficulty of collecting his fees. (5) He is best known, however, not as a medical man but for the Itinerarium, a journal of a trip he took through the northern colonies in 1744. He also created a gentlemen's society modeled on those he knew in Scotland, the Tuesday Club, a major impetus for intellectual, literary, and musical developments in the colony. (6)

He had come to Maryland for its economic opportunities but soon realized that achieving wealth was not an easy prospect. His own personal resources were severely limited leaving him in debt to his family in Scotland and England for their handouts over the years. (7) At first he resolved "to live a bachelor while I remain in this wicked country" where it was so "Extremely hard to turn rich." (8) He hoped that marriage to the daughter of a wealthy man would permanently solve his financial problems but that goal was frustrated early on by conflicting colonial ambitions in regard to prosperity and social prestige. The door to the colonial marriage market was not closed to the immigrant of slender means, but access required techniques different from those of the local elite who drew on kin contacts to promote marriage among their own kind. (9) Hamilton's success was due in no small measure to his devising an imaginative social organization to replace those contacts and by using his social and cultural talents as a unique currency to substitute for actual wealth. His is an intriguing example of the complicated motives and techniques that entered into the process of finding a mate at the upper levels of colonial society. (10)

Although among affluent Chesapeake families the acquisition of even greater wealth continued to be the main focus of marital arrangements during the eighteenth century, the quest for identification with British upper-class manners and values was also of consideration. (11) Hamilton, with his cultured life style and status as an emigre of good family, played on that colonial anxiety. He successfully mediated between the sometimes conflicting emotional and economic goals of the provincial elite in order to satisfy his own desires for a suitable marriage.

As an immigrant, Hamilton suffered severely from the separation from his family--especially from his sisters and brothers in Scotland--but also the complex kin network that provided him with a sense of identity and emotional satisfaction. As an unattached male immigrant, his was a lonely existence in America. It was an uncomfortable life in a society where the sharing of households was the norm. Most unmarried men in the colonies, like their sisters, lived with a father or a sibling; they seldom established separate households while single. (12) Sandy's friend, Stephen Bordley, for instance, who never married, lived with his brothers and stepbrothers for a while but he spent his last years in a house he shared with his sister, Elizabeth. (13) Hamilton most uncommonly lived alone and suffered severe emotional strain as a result.